Base_Six OP t1_jc8uiu3 wrote
This is a topic I've been thinking about for a while: the notion that if we can identify beliefs that we ought to hold, we can utilize them in a knowledge-like matter even if they fall short of being knowledge themselves. Furthermore, if we can state with some degree of certainty that our beliefs are the ones that we ought to hold, whether or not they are knowledge is far less relevant.
This is also my first go at writing and sharing philosophy; I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
HamiltonBrae t1_jcgawei wrote
What do you mean by beliefs here? If a belief is "a subjective attitude that something or proposition is true", then I feel like a reasonable/justified belief that something is true isn't really that different from knowledge here. Obviously, the thing you believe has to be true to count as knowledge but then you believe it is true by the definition of belief. If your evidence is strong enough or reasonable enough where you subjectively have no doubt then to me that says you would logically believe that you have knowledge of it, so is there much practical difference? In cases where you have less confidence or certainty in the evidence then yes you may not believe you have knowledge because you are obviously not sure; but then again, I don't think someone who is engaging in the "folly of knowledge" which you are arguing against would say they have knowledge either, because they are unsure: the stances are hard to distinguish. So, even if knowledge here is defined by JTB, I may not practically be able to get rid of the belief in knowledge; I believe I have knowledge in certain circumstances where subjective uncertainty approaches zero (e.g. like where my house is). Your article's view ends up with something like a Moorean paradox of claiming to be "discarding knowledge" but still logically ending up believing in it in the same cases someone would normally. Surely then the problems of skepticism about knowledge remain when using the term belief as defined above, if you believe that you have knowledge (regardless of whether you actually do under JTB)?
Regarding your skeptical hypothesis: you say we shouldn't believe the strongest skeptical hypotheses because they are "unactionable". I will give you that one, though I think maybe its conceivable for some one to have weird/incoherent beliefs like that and still function. The unactionable thing doesn't really seem to affect most of the weaker skeptical hypotheses at all though; just believing (or even just being unsure that) you live in a simulation or an evil demon deceiving your senses you seem to be things that don't contradict "actionable" beliefs at all; its still possible to have a normal life in a simulation.
Also, it seems that what counts as reasonable evidence is subjective. Your examples kind of preach to the choir of someone with relatively normal beliefs but could you actually convince someone who holds some of these skeptical hypotheses to change their beliefs? Probably not if their beliefs seem reasonable to them. Their beliefs and what counts as evidence may seem arbitrary and weird but so might yours to them. They might ask about your "falsifiable hypotheses" of why you can be so sure that there are no bees in the suitcase or how you know your test to check the broken watch is reliable. I feel like ultimately you would end up resorting to things like "because it happened before" or "because I remember these things tend to happen", then they might ask how can you show that this memory or knowledge is reliable and that opens the door for them to say that you're beliefs are just coming out of nowhere or that you haven't shown or justified that they are definitely true and that the skeptic should believe them. I think if you cannot convince the skeptic then you haven't truly solved the problem, unless you are implying in the article that the skeptic should believe in their skeptical hypotheses based on their "reasonable beliefs". I guess thats fine but its unintuitive to me to pit these different hypotheses against eachother if the message is just essentially believe whatever you think is reasonable. Neither would there seem to be much consequence of someone simply entertaining their uncertainty about an evil demon or even crossing the threshold to belief if doing so didn't have any effect on their "actionable" living.
I think an interesting point also is that these types of skeptical hypotheses are held by real people in some sense. Some people genuinely believe we are in a simulation, some people believe that the universe is purely mental(or physical) and many many people believe in some kind of God. Is God that much different from a (non)evil demon? Especially something like a creationist God where all of the evidence for evolution ans that the universe is billions of years old is just wrong.
Edit: Following from the last paragraph, it's also interesting to think how a Christian crisis of faith is kind of analogous to the skeptical problems raised by descartes, but inverted. Christians are faced with the problem that it is conceivable that their world could have been created without the existence of a (non)evil demon, and so everthing that follows in their beliefs is also false.
Base_Six OP t1_jcgtaf8 wrote
I think there's space for an everyday sort of knowledge if we define it as "beliefs in which I'm highly certain, and for which I'm highly certain I will not encounter contrary evidence." That feels like it falls far short of the general philosophical constructions of knowledge, though. For instance, under that sort of construct I can "know" things that are false, or know things that are contrary to my other beliefs. It's a useful shorthand, but not the same thing as the Knowledge of Descartes, Russell, or Goldman. It's a far cry removed from JTB, in any case.
There's people that subjectively have no doubt that the world is flat. Does that mean they have knowledge that the world is flat? Similarly, I have had dreams in which I've had zero subjective doubt that what I'm experiencing is reality. Does that mean I know my dreams to be reality? I don't think these sorts of edge cases are a problem for a colloquial knowledge-as-strong-belief sort of a construction, but I think they speak to its frailty as a philosophical construct.
I would define "reasonable" as the conclusions you come to that you subjectively feel to be most logical. These may not actually be logically sound, but we have to make do with the best we're capable of. If there's better logic out there that I don't have access to, it's irrelevant to me when I ask the question of what I ought to believe.
The caveat here is that I'm premising that statement on the notion that said logic is inaccessible. If I gain access to new logic, it would be unreasonable for me to discard it out of hand because it disagrees with my conclusions. This applies to most conspiracy theorists: they aren't unreasonable because they've come to false conclusions, they're unreasonable because they've supported their false conclusions on the basis of cherrypicked and/or fabricated evidence that's extensively contradicted. Ignoring those contradictions and ignoring the baseless construction of those beliefs is what renders them unreasonable.
If someone believes the Earth is flat because they're a child in an isolated community that's been told by trusted teachers and parents that the Earth is flat, they're reasonable in holding that belief. If someone is insistent in believing the Earth is flat when confronted with the mountains of counter-evidence and thousand year old proofs of its roundness, those same beliefs are no longer reasonable.
HamiltonBrae t1_jcpqfxt wrote
Sorry, late reply;
>It's a far cry removed from JTB, in any case.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough but my point was that using that definition of belief, then I think someone should logically believe that they have justified true beliefs If they believe that some fact is true and they think that that belief is justified. If you believe in justified true beliefs then surely it undermines the paradigm which wants to get rid of knowledge. The knowledge and non-knowledge views would be indistinguishable from a person's perspective from a practical viewpoint. My point is then not so much about whether knowledge actually exists in the JTB sense but whether someone should logically believe they have knowledge in the JTB sense under your scheme. I see you have specified your definition of reasonable though. I assumed that reasonable was more or less synonymous with justification since at face value when I think of someone having a reasonable belief then I think they are justifed in it, but maybe I should have anticipated some difference. Thinking more deeply though, I guess justification is complicated and I don't think I can even define the limits too well of where justification starts and ends.
At the same time, I don't think this affects my argument too much; but again, the more I think about this, the more complicated it seems to get. We can talk about someone believing something is a true when they have no uncertainty; we can also talk about someone believing their belief is reasonable or justified. Presumably they wouldn't assent to a belief that they didn't think was reasonable but if they were open to believing that some of those reasonable beliefs were justified then I think they would again be forced to believe that they had knowledge. Neither would I think that it differs from the knowledge position you argue against since someone working unser the assumption that knowlede was possible would also not believe they have knowledge if they didn't believe their belief was totally justified. So as long as a person believe that beliefs can be justified, then they should logically believe that they have knowledge.
>This applies to most conspiracy theorists: they aren't unreasonable because they've come to false conclusions, they're unreasonable because they've supported their false conclusions on the basis of cherrypicked and/or fabricated evidence that's extensively contradicted. Ignoring those contradictions and ignoring the baseless construction of those beliefs is what renders them unreasonable.
>If someone believes the Earth is flat because they're a child in an isolated community that's been told by trusted teachers and parents that the Earth is flat, they're reasonable in holding that belief.
If someone holds a belief reasonably because they have been taught it and don't know better then why can't someone have a reasonable belief from cherry picked/fabricated evidence. I think these two sources of knowledge are blurry because on one hand, the taught knowledge in the isolated community is going to be due to error/fabrication/cherry picking/deception while on the otherhand someone who holds their views despite counter evidence is going to subjectively feel that they are being reasonable and they cannot help that. They feel that the counter evidence they are shown is inadequate just as the non-conspiratorial person would feel about the evidence they are given by the conspiracy theorist; If the evidence doesn't seem reasonable to them, how can they help that? In their logic, what they have been shown just doesn't count as counter evidence. In your words, they come to conclusions about the counter evidenceu that they feel subjectively to be most logical. These may not actually be logically sound, but they have to make do with the best they're capable of.
Now, I do think that some beliefs seem more unreasonable to me than others (like conspiratorial ones) but its doesn't seem straightforward to defeat a skeptic purely with reason. Neither does there seem to be a straightforward divide between reasonable and unreasonable. For instance, some Christians may think their views are totally reasonable and conspiracy theorists views are totally unreasonable; but then again, I might think believing God is totally unreasonable. It doesn't seem sufficient to resolve the problem of skeptical hypotheses purely by "reasonable beliefs" if a person, specifically a skeptic, thinks the skeptical hypothesis is reasonable.
Base_Six OP t1_jd49j0w wrote
You can believe that you have JTB knowledge, but at that point what we're talking about is no different than any justified belief we possess. After all, we don't hold beliefs that we consider false. I think you could even reasonably describe a "Reasonable Belief" as one in which we ought to believe is justified and true, or to say it differently, that we believe is JTB knowledge.
The difference comes in terms of how we view a belief that is false. Under a JTB conception of knowledge, we usually say that someone can't actually know something that is false. While you can believe that you know that the Earth is flat, you can't actually know it because it's round. Under a Reasonable Belief paradigm, you can have a reasonable but incorrect belief. If someone believes something that's incorrect because they've got deficient evidence, that doesn't make their belief unreasonable.
What makes something unreasonable is if the justification we use to construct that belief isn't logically sound. For instance, cherrypicking evidence to support a belief is logically fallacious, so any belief that's supported based on cherrypicked evidence is unreasonable. This is the case even if the belief is true: coming to the correct conclusion doesn't mean we used logically sound methods to arrive at that conclusion. The difference between being taught something that's based on cherrypicked evidence and doing the cherrypicking yourself is that in the former case, you don't have the evidence necessary to tell that there's cherrypicking happening. That said, if we're aware that evidence and teaching can be flawed then we logically ought to check our sources. We should understand how our sources constructed their beliefs, as much as possible, and grant credence or disbelief to those sources appropriately.
Different people ought to come to different conclusions about a belief if they start with different evidence or different premises. Conspiratorial thinking is what renders a belief unreasonable, not the conclusions it generates.
HamiltonBrae t1_jddu4gn wrote
>You can believe that you have JTB knowledge
&nsbp;
Yes, I just think that under the reasonable belief paradigm that this is a contradiction. I think the idea of believing certain things are true has to be given up or surrogated with something else like the belief that something is empirically adequate. The contradiction could just be ignored I guess but arguably that also undermines the point of doing this kind of thinking which I think is to reduce things like that; after all, why was the reasonable belief paradign asserted in the first place. I think everyone probably inevitably tolerates some level of contradiction or paradox in their views though.
>The difference between being taught something that's based on cherrypicked evidence and doing the cherrypicking yourself is that in the former case, you don't have the evidence necessary to tell that there's cherrypicking happening.
I don't think you have the evidence to tell there is cherrypicking happening when you do it yourself either though. You think your picking of evidence is completely reasonable and isn't cherry picked at all. On the contrary, you will think the opposition are cherry picking evidence and ignoring your evidence.
>That said, if we're aware that evidence and teaching can be flawed then we logically ought to check our sources.
Yes, but we have more confidence in some sources or evidence than others to the point we don't think we need to check. We would consider this reasonable yet its possible the confidence is misplaced (and often is).
>and grant credence or disbelief to those sources appropriately.
And what is appropriate will seem different to different people.
>Different people ought to come to different conclusions about a belief if they start with different evidence or different premises. Conspiratorial thinking is what renders a belief unreasonable, not the conclusions it generates.
Its hard to see what separates conspiratorial from reasonable here because they are just coming from different evidences and premises too.
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